10/11/2011

Renovations

One of the tiles on my kitchen floor is cracked. (It is cracked because I dropped a jar of tomato sauce on it, but that’s not really relevant, is it?) So, I’ve been investigating different options for replacing the kitchen floor. Of course, while looking at kitchen floors in the home-improvement store, (3 hours away because OUR town is WAY too small for things like THAT…) I became a little distracted. I do that sometimes. So I’ve started a list of other home renovations that would greatly improve our family life.

I’ll start in the kitchen. Aside from the new floor made of something super-durable (read: won’t scratch when the kids ride skate boards on it, and won’t break when I drop stuff on it) I will need new appliances. We need a self-cleaning double oven, a self-cleaning microwave and, if possible a self-cleaning counter. They make that, right? I could use two full sized fridges – one for milk, and one for everything else. Then maybe I won’t have to go to the grocery store Every. Single. Day. We will also need new cabinets, all up over the head of the tallest child, so they can’t take everything out and leave it on the counter. Except I’m not really that tall either, so we’ll need to make sure that at least the liquor cabinet is down low enough to be reachable. Yeah. That’s right. Cereal, snacks and everything else up high. Wine where I can reach it. Perhaps we can have adjustable height cabinets so that as the kids grow taller and their indiscretions change we can keep one step ahead of them. Or at least one step higher. Oh! And we need a chef.

The playroom we have is lovely, and just large enough to contain the enormous mess my children create in it every day. The only modification it needs is sound-proofing. And maybe rubber walls. And some type of apparatus that automatically disposes of any toys or game parts that have been left on the floor for more than 30 days.

Our dining room is only about 2 feet larger than our gi-normous table, so maybe we could extend that a little bit. The floor in there needs replacing too. I’m thinking poured cement with a drain in the middle so I can just hose down the whole room after dinner.

Next up, as long as we’re into a little remodeling, could be an add-on room for pets. Since we last spoke, we had a little hamster catastrophe. You see, it appears hamsters don’t actually want to live together. It also appears that hamsters, when forced to live together, will kill each other. Gross. And it also seems that the man at the pet store didn’t think that was an important thing to tell me. The children recovered quickly when we promised to upgrade to a guinea pig. Now we have to build a new room so we have someplace to put the humungous guinea pig cage. We’ll also need to keep Brady and Alice in there. Hmm… Huge naughty dog and little stupid dog in the same room with a small rodent? Maybe we need two “pet rooms.” Or, maybe we need fewer pets.

Moving outdoors, perhaps some sort of magnetic field that would pull all the toys back into the garage, so they don’t lay in our yard until the dogs chew them up?

So aside from replacing all of the carpet the stupid dogs ruined and repainting over all of the kids’ fingerprints on every single surface, I think that’s about it.